Introduction (Fall 2011 version)

by Kristen Nawrotzki and Jack Dougherty

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Our book began as a conversation among historians around one of our core work processes: the act of writing. Has the digital revolution transformed how we write about the past — or not? Have new technologies changed our essential work-craft as scholars, and the way in which we think, teach, author, and publish? Does the digital age have broader implications for individual writing processes, or for the historical profession at large? We seek to answer these questions in Writing History in the Digital Age, an edited volume under contract with the University of Michigan Press for the Digital Humanities Series at its digitalculturebooks imprint.1 In this collection of essays, historians discuss, debate, and demonstrate how our writing is reshaped by a range of electronic tools and techniques: crowdsourcing, relational databases, text encoding, spatial analysis, visual media, gaming simulations, and online collaborations. Even the conventional practice on how to disseminate this collection of essays is being turned on its head.

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Rather than creating a conventional book, the subject led us to experiment with a different approach to scholarly publishing. First, our edited volume is born-digital, meaning that we have integrated web technology more deeply into the fundamental processes of writing, revising, and publishing our work. What better way for historians to reflect on digital tools than while using them to write a book? The computing industry’s more colorful language calls this “eating your own dog food.”2 The “How it works” section details the open-source WordPress platform that hosts all of our essays and commentary. In the spirit of the open web, we made the normally behind-the-scenes key stages of the book more transparent. In “How this book evolved,” readers can trace our ideas beginning with the fall 2010 pilot project, the subsequent pitch to the publisher and responses to reviewers, and early exchanges between authors during the essay idea phase.

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Second, we created an open-review book to encourage commentary from three invited experts (appointed by the Press) as well as readers from the public during a six-week period, from October 6th to November 14, 2011. As the “How to comment” tutorial explains, anyone may respond to the text at three levels: general comments on the book as a whole, an individual essay page, or specific paragraph. All must identify using a full name; no anonymous feedback is permitted. The objective is to encourage all readers — both invited experts and general audiences, senior scholars and novice students — to openly participate in the process of peer review and make our personal judgments about what “good writing” means in the history profession more visible to all. To be sure, the Press may rely primarily on comments posted by its appointed experts in making its final publication decision. But the “wisdom of the crowd” may influence, or even outweigh, the experts. Furthermore, to recognize the behind-the-scenes work of peer review, we will invite up to three of the most thoughtfully engaged online commentators to submit reflective essays for the conclusion of the edited volume. Granting the honor of writing the “last words” this way, rather than automatically turning to “famous names” in the field, stems from a suggestion by two open-review advocates in the humanities, Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Kathleen Rowe.3 Our goal is to reward intellectual engagement regardless of status, perhaps from graduate students, independent scholars, or voices from outside the field, and reward thoughtful commentary that makes scholarly publishing communities possible.

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Finally, our digital volume is open-access, or freely shared with readers on the public web. No subscription fee, password, or proprietary e-reader device is required to view or comment on our scholarship. Based on open-source software, our web-book can be read on the current version of all major browsers, whether on a desktop or laptop computer (and on some tablet and phone devices, though with limited ability to post comments). As described in our “Editorial and Intellectual Property Policy,” all contributors agreed to distribute the content of their essays under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (BY-NC) license for this site, which allows authors to retain the copyright of the work while making a non-exclusive agreement to freely share it with others, as long as the original source is cited.4 Furthermore, as outlined in our book contract, if the Press approves the final manuscript, they also will publish it under a Creative Commons license, and we anticipate it will be made available in two formats: a print edition (for sale) and an online version (for free).

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Embedded within this web-book is a broader argument for rethinking how academics publish our work, particularly in history and other humanities fields that have been relatively slow to embrace change in the digital era. Compared to other scholars, historians tend to research and write in isolation from one another. We typically author long monographs that may take several years, largely unseen by others, to eventually reach an audience. For this reason, we decided to explore how digital tools might help us to produce a more collaborative type of publication: an edited volume. As a genre, the edited volume can represent the worst qualities of humanities scholarship: fragmented, disjointed chapters that bear little intellectual relationship to one another. Reviewers politely refer to poorly implemented volumes as having “uneven quality,” or less politely as “staple jobs”. Part of the problem traces back to old practices. Traditionally, a “call for papers” announcement is circulated, individual contributors submit completed chapters, and volume editors make cuts, suggest revisions, and strive to package everything as a whole. Yet under this model, authors typically have little access to each other’s ideas or drafts during the generative or revising periods, and therefore lack the capacity to share comments and build connections across the volume as a whole.

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By contrast, Writing History in the Digital Age proposes a better way to create an edited volume. Moving the “call for essays” phase online, as we did in early summer 2011, enabled prospective contributors to offer and respond to each other’s ideas, creating more opportunities for intellectual coherence before drafting their full essays. At present, our “open review” phase welcomes participation by invited experts and general readers on the public web, with the potential to improve our editing more than conventional practices. Think of this as “liquid scholarship,” akin to the demands for “liquid democracy” — the chaining of ideas and recommendations– currently being made by Europe’s burgeoning Pirate political parties.5 Finally, if our completed manuscript is accepted, partnering with an established academic press to publish the volume in dual formats (paper for sale, and digital for free) could vastly increase its audience beyond the typical high-price hardbound-only edition. Digital tools do not do the job alone. A successful volume brings together insightful authors with divergent perspectives, and thoughtful readers to recommend cuts, reorganization, and revisions where needed. Our proposition is simply that web technology, when wisely implemented, can help us to create and circulate an edited volume in ways more consistent with our broader scholarly values.

Permalink for this paragraph6Historians as writers
Historians value good writing. All scholars construct new forms of knowledge, but we tend to hold our profession to a very high standard when writing about our discoveries. We prefer clear and persuasive prose over data tables or abstract jargon. We favor book-length monographs over the article-based publishing traditions of the social sciences. And most of all, we appreciate the importance of narrative, the ability to wrap meaningful insights about the past into a good story.

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Despite the central role that writing plays within our profession, its practice remains mostly hidden from public view. By and large, we historians do our work — the acts of researching, writing, and publishing — alone, rather than in collaboration with others. While we prize the influential books that hold a special place on our bookshelves and in our minds, historians rarely reveal the underlying processes that led to these finished products. Writing is our shared craft, the glue that unites our profession, but we tend to be private about it. “Do not circulate or cite without permission of the author” is an all-too-familiar warning label appearing on drafts of papers delivered at our conferences. Given this state of secrecy, how do we expect historians-in-training to learn our craft? How do we expect them to develop their skills as writers, particularly of dissertations and books, without openly sharing and comparing our writing processes? How can we advance the overall quality of writing in the profession without asking all of us to reinvent our own wheels? Collectively, the ideas presented here seek to interrupt this norm of silence within our profession, pull back the curtain, and make our individual work processes more public.

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The fact that this volume about writing has been digitally conceived, developed, and published is anything but coincidental. We see this volume and the essays in it as an intervention into a complex and changing landscape of digital scholarship and scholarly publishing. On the one hand, in the last decade self-described digital humanists have delineated and demonstrated the numerous and wide-ranging ways in which technology might make speed up and improve the quality of research and writing in the humanities.6 Discipline-specific efforts in the field of digital history have been led by institutions such as the George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM)7, encouraged by the American Historical Association and undertaken by individuals and groups of scholars both and outside the academy.8 As CHNM’s Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig explained in their seminal 2005 how-to guide, digital technology allows historians to “do more, reach more people, store more data, give readers more varied sources; we can get more historical materials into classrooms, give students more access to formerly cloistered documents, hear from more perspectives.” In addition, digital media both extend and fundamentally change the way we read and understand information by rendering it manipulable and interactive, and allowing us to access it in nonlinear form.9

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On the other hand, and despite these purported benefits, scholars in humanities disciplines – and historians in particular – have been especially slow to embrace digital technology for the research, writing, and dissemination of their scholarship. The findings of recent surveys indicate that the vast majority of history faculty are neither engaging with digital tools for analysis nor are they digitally disseminating their in-progress or completed work.10 These same scholars use email, word processing software, online search engines and digital archives in the course of producing scholarship, but they do not avail themselves of the many technologies designed to assist in data analysis and text composition.11 Approximately twenty percent of historians claim to have published scholarship online, but more than half of those may have been digitized versions of articles published in print journals.12 That leaves only about ten percent of historians who have shared their scholarship in digital form on the open web, whether on personal blogs or institutional or project-specific websites, as digital documentaries, games or apps, as essays in web-born journals or in Wikipedia. Why so few? Clues to this lie both in the circumstances that shape the process and products of historians’ writing, and in the reasons why historians publish in the first place.

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For historians – as for all authors — writing is an individual and highly personal process, as well as a materially- and culturally-situated one.13 There is something understandable – even commendable – about scholars wanting to stay with what they know, appreciate, and do well. Until very recently, people who wanted to publish short pieces to be read by a broad readership on a regular basis became journalists, not historians. So although we might all benefit from having more historians blogging their scholarship, for example, it hardly comes as a surprise that we do not. Moreover, as applied linguist Ken Hyland emphasizes, “Academic writing is not just about conveying an ideational ‘content’, it is also about the representation of self.”14 In other words, we are what we write – and what we read – and historians on the whole appear disinclined to alter that however compelling the logic behind it.15 And yet, as the essays in this volume attest, the logic is indeed compelling, as is our responsibility as intellectuals, in Donald Hall’s words: “to question, reinterrogate, unsettle, and dissipate familiarities … and we — our selves — should hold no privileged position vis-à-vis that critical engagement.”16

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Beyond the personal, historians’ willingness to engage in digital history hinges, too, on (perceived) material, technological, and temporal constraints. By definition, digital history utilizes different tools, differently, than most historians are used to. It has its own vocabulary and requires different skills sets (emphasizing, for example, curation as opposed to detective work).17 Would-be digital historians who are used to working alone, with only a word processor, may be daunted or dismayed by the prospect of managing a multi-software or multi-contributor project. Many of us lack the basic literacy in digital genres and technologies and information architecture to be able to articulate our ideas, whilst others are hesitant to immerse themselves in the new technologies, lest they become obsolete before the historian’s work is even finished.18 Historians may not have access to the time, money or technical support necessary to realize some forms of digital scholarship.19 Or, we may be unaware that we do in fact have access to these, or that we may can do some forms of digital history – including joining extant projects – without them.

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The third major influence on historians’ engagement with digital history has been the culture of scholarship within the discipline itself.20 To date, historians’ culture and modus operandi have typically been the opposite of the speed and openness, the collaborative spirit and do-it-yourself mentality that characterize the Internet at its best. In their work, historians by and large seek to be comprehensive rather than (necessarily) innovative – and comprehensiveness takes time.21 “On the ‘slow side of sharing’,” we hoard and hone our ideas prior to publication rather than widely circulate working papers or pre-prints like those in other disciplines, and once submitted for peer review, our articles and monographs may take up to three years to appear in print.22 In the interim, we fear that the exposure of our messy path to supposed perfection will lead others either to scoop our ideas or else to discover that we are not as clever as our peer-reviewed published works would have them believe.23 Historians’ secrecy about their work may indeed support the harsh competitiveness which some feel has come to define the academy more broadly.24 To the contrary, in accordance with the do-it-yourself culture of the Internet, the sharing of thinking-in-progress seems to encourage more collaboration than competition amongst scholars (and others), while also modelling the “historical habits of mind” we seek to teach our students.25

Permalink for this paragraph1Why do we publish?
Pose that question to any humanities scholar, particularly an historian in today’s uncertain academic job market, and you’re likely to hear a confusing mix of answers that reveal the competing interests we face. Historians are an anxious breed. As we write our conference papers, journal articles, and book manuscripts, we worry about money, ownership, status, and tenure. Yet while obsessing over these individualistic factors, we often lose track of the broader scholarly values that motivate us to share our knowledge and engage with the ideas of others.

Permalink for this paragraph0Publishing for financial gain: For most historians, we can quickly dispense with the money argument. If your primary goal was to get rich, then publishing scholarly monographs in the humanities is not the fastest way to get there. Our general understanding is that a typical academic press considers a book to be successful if it sells at least 1,000 print copies. Assuming a royalty of 5 percent based on books retailed at $30 each, this arrangement yields the author a modest sum of $1,500. But most historians probably have spent an equal or greater sum on out-of-pocket expenses in researching and producing a book such as this. In addition to what for many of us is uncompensated time, many historians commonly pay their own research travel, photocopying, copyright permissions, and indexing costs. Indeed, the financial payoff for a bestselling trade-press book, or popular textbook, is far greater. But those experiences are not the norm and most historians’ primary motivator is something other than money.

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In fact, our current models of scholarly publishing place a growing financial burden on university and college libraries. In practice, faculty members effectively give away our journal and book manuscripts to publishers for the privilege of seeing them in print. In turn, publishers sell faculty scholarship back to our academic libraries, and charge them a price for the right to lend out print copies or disseminate digital copies on proprietary databases. As a result, higher education pays twice for scholarship produced by its own faculty: first, in the form of salary or sabbatical support for individual professors, and second, in fees for the right to distribute the work. (The financial burden is more extreme in the grant-funded sciences, where commercial publishers charge substantially higher journal subscription fees to libraries, and publication fees to contributing authors.) The current business model benefits neither the average historian, nor the institutions of higher education that employ many of us.

Permalink for this paragraph1Publishing for professional status: Another argument is that academics publish to avoid perishing. Writing an important book matters greatly to the gatekeepers of academic success: the committees and deans that hire faculty and evaluate them for tenure. While an individual history book may yield only modest author’s royalties, it may indirectly determine whether a candidate receives a job offer with a stable long-term salary, or promotion to a higher-paying rank. But for most historians, what matters most is our reputation within the profession, which tends to be based largely on our publications, the aspect of our work that, when compared with teaching, is more widely visible to our peers. The problem arises when scholars insert their perception of a publisher’s status as a proxy for the quality of a particular book, without evaluating it directly. Many historians carry with us a vague pecking order of scholarly publishers, and the assumption that those near the top exercise more selective editorial filtering than those below. With so many books produced and so little time to read, we tend to substitute our vague notions of the publisher’s prestige in place of informed judgment about the quality of the text. Moreover, publishers have warned universities against basing faculty tenure decisions solely on their decision to accept or reject a manuscript. When academic publishers rely on book sales revenue to pay their editorial and production costs, their definition of a “good” book is inevitably tied up with a “marketable” one. Quality, status, and marketability are neither identical nor interchangeable.

Permalink for this paragraph0Publishing to share ideas: The most principled reason for academics to publish is to share and engage with the ideas of others, as part of a larger process of enriching the body of knowledge. At its best, producing scholarship means stepping out of individual isolation and into a public forum, where we test out new ideas, build on foundations offered by others, and challenge ways of thinking that may conflict with our own point of view. By sharing ideas in our writing, and by reflecting on and responding to the writing of others, we contribute to the creation of intellectual communities. The more widely ideas are shared, the better. Neither personal gain nor professional status is the primary motivation here. Instead, we publish to become part of something larger than ourselves.

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While we aspire toward this noble goal in Writing History in the Digital Age, we also recognize the pressures for professional advancement faced particularly by newer scholars entering the field. At a conference workshop where we demonstrated our digital pilot project, we heard from many graduate students and junior faculty who were eager to share their historical writing online, but who also needed affirmation that it would “count” in the eyes of future hiring and tenure committees. Could we find an established peer-reviewed journal or press whose role would lend sufficient status to enable them to fully participate in our collective effort? At the same time, we wondered whether we could find a journal or press that embraced our ideal of sharing our scholarship on the open web. Might there be a middle ground where all of our needs could be met?

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One intriguing possibility was the University of Michigan Press. In 2009, the University restructured its Press under its Library, replacing its fiscal dependence on book revenues with a fixed budget and a new mission statement: “to use the best emerging digital technology to disseminate such information as freely and widely as possible while preserving the integrity of published scholarship.”26 The Press continues to maintain its editorial role and peer-review standards, but distributes scholarly books through a combination of print-on-demand and open digital access.

Permalink for this paragraph0Why not publish on the open web?
Two words that strike fear in the hearts of many historians are “blogs” and “wikis”. The problem is not simply that these web technologies may be new and unfamiliar, but rather that they challenge us to reconsider established norms about “what counts” as scholarly work in our colleges and universities. For instance, if the new history professor at the other end of the hall starts a blog, should that count as a publication? What if it’s a long, expository blog essay with scholarly footnotes? If there are readers’ comments on a blog, especially from other historians, should this count as peer review? Or must a publisher other than the author be involved in the process? If so, does that mean we should “count” an essay that a historian contributed to an online publication, such as Wikipedia? What if the Wikipedia entry was expanded upon or modified by other contributors? Would that make it count more, or less? And what on earth does it mean to “publish” scholarly work in this digital age? These questions make some historians nervous.

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In fact, it is neither blogs nor wikis, but rather another trend entirely that historians should be afraid of: the creeping price of scholarly monographs. As authors, our worst nightmare is to toil away years on a book that no one reads. Many of us are watching academic publishers issue hardcover-only editions and holding off on paperbacks in an effort to squeeze as much sales revenue as possible from libraries. Last year our jaws dropped when a major publisher listed a colleague’s hardcover historical monograph at $95. The author’s copyrighted text is locked inside a very expensive box, with no legal recourse to let it out. Some of our academic libraries will refuse to buy it. When books are priced this high, who can afford to read what we write? What happens to our noble goal of publishing to share and engage in the ideas of others?

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Understandably, many historians still favor printed books as a familiar and reliable mode for sharing knowledge. Books offer a stable technology that does not rely on Internet access or operating systems. We enjoy the feel of books in the palms of our hands, the ease of reading wherever we choose to sit, and the ability to display our acquired knowledge on our bookshelves. We can purchase them from local booksellers and online vendors, or borrow them from academic and public libraries (provided that these institutions continue to be supported by tuition and tax dollars). But one serious limitation of printed books is that they are built to provide only one-way scholarly communication of ideas, from author to audience. Information is disseminated to readers, who play no part in the knowledge-development process, unless they also happen to discuss it in a class or book group, send a letter to the author, write a book review, or incorporate it into their own scholarship. Certainly, readers can take the initiative to dialogue with the author or other readers, but printed books, by themselves, are not designed to promote a two-way exchange of ideas.

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Despite the fanfare surrounding e-books, the current generation of this digital technology comes with its own issues. The e-book formats currently found most commonly in academic libraries allow users to flip through images of book pages on our browsers, search the text, and copy passages into our notes, but do not alter the one-way flow of scholarly communication from author to audience. Consumer-oriented e-books, such as the Amazon’s Kindle, now permit readers to pay for an upgraded service to create highlights and notes on the text, which may be publicly shared online. However, Amazon’s initial e-book licensing agreement was not library-friendly, and did not legally permit the lending of content.27 Very recently, in September 2011, the company appears to have shifted its policy by launching a beta program for selected public libraries to distribute e-books, but users are redirected from the public catalog to Amazon’s commercial website with sales pitches. Critics have questioned the practice of using taxpayer-funded public libraries to boost Amazon’s hardware sales (ranging from $80 to $200 per unit).28 Whether proprietary e-books are a cost-effective means to expand public interaction with historical scholarship remains doubtful.

Permalink for this paragraph1Our web-book design
When proposing this volume, we sought a digital format that matched our scholarly values of sharing and engaging ideas in public. Unlike most e-books (which emphasize one-way communication) or proprietary formats (with require subscription fees or purchasing a new device), our solution was to create a what we call a “web-book”: built with open-source tools, it allows readers to freely access and respond to the text online, using a standard web browser. (Hint: You’re reading a web-book right now. Try posting a comment to tell us what you think.) We believe that open-web scholarly publishing can merge the best of digital innovation and traditional practices. Among its more important qualities, it should:

Permalink for this paragraph2Look like a book. Our model uses a combination of open-source WordPress tools to deliver what historians seek: easily readable pages of text, divided into chapters and sections, with clear attribution to individual authors or co-authors, and Chicago-style footnotes. All of our software is freely available, and we were able to modify portions to fit our specific needs.

Permalink for this paragraph0Protect author’s attribution rights while maximizing public access. Our text is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, an extension of standard copyright that allows readers to freely share the essay content, with a citation to the author. Furthermore, our WordPress technology welcomes readers’ comments in the margins while assuring authors that other readers cannot “rewrite” their original text (as wiki-style tools allow). As the book’s editors, we also serve as website administrators, with the power to moderate any comments deemed as inappropriate, according to our editorial policy.

Permalink for this paragraph0Integrate narrative text and multimedia source materials. This quality strongly interests historians whose arguments rely upon evidence not easily captured in conventional print. Visual historians can display images and video, social science historians can upload datasets, and spatial historians can walk us through maps. With open-web publishing, authors can link to any source that is freely available on the Internet. By contrast, Amazon’s current best selling historical e-books with audio and/or video clips provide only a limited selection of media content, packaged inside the proprietary book file, not on the public web.

Permalink for this paragraph0Speed up the scholarly dissemination process. New editions of our text can be instantly distributed on the web, while we maintain archival editions and continue to make them publicly accessible. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that more work needs to be done with improving the stability of permalinks when archiving digital works like this one.

Permalink for this paragraph1Be compatible with existing library search tools. For example, the Trinity College Library (Hartford, Connecticut) agreed to create a MARC record for this open-review edition of Writing History in the Digital Age, and upload it to its local online library catalogue, as well as WorldCat, to increase its likelihood of being found by others. (We’ll add the link as soon as it becomes available.)

Permalink for this paragraph2Be accessible through print-on-demand. Open-web scholarship needs to be available when are unplugged from the Internet, by necessity or by choice. At present, we acknowledge that printing the open-review edition of Writing History in the Digital Age is difficult, due to the current limitations of the CommentPress plugin. Future options may be to migrate to a forthcoming version of digress.it, another WordPress tool for text commentary, or the next version of Anthologize, a WordPress tool for archiving dynamic text and comments in archival formats. (The latter can produce a PDF, ePub, or TEI version of the text and images that may be uploaded to a print-on-demand service with paperback binding.)

Permalink for this paragraph0Promote peer review with two-way scholarly communication. Socially-networked texts allow substantive communication between writers and readers. As authors, we cannot judge whether our own writing successfully communicates complex ideas without receiving some type of feedback from our intended audience. When publishing a scholarly print or e-book, we generally have little idea how it is received unless a reader happens to contact us directly, or an academic journal prints a review, typically a year or two later. But online commenting, combined with web page-view data, tells us exactly which passages readers praised, panned or never bothered to read.

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Perhaps the scariest question for historians is: Do we really want to know what our readers think? Or how many readers we actually have? The risk of having our ideas openly criticized, on the very same digital pages that we labored over, is very real. But it also forces us to reflect on the central question — why do we publish? — and whether we genuinely desire to share and engage with the ideas of others in public, or prefer the traditional norms of writing in private and publishing in increasingly expensive and exclusive outlets.

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Whether they prefer print, e-books, or web-books, all historians agree that the quality of the work is what truly matters. Yet we sometimes lack agreement on how scholarly work should be evaluated (particularly in the humanities), and at what stage(s) of the process it should happen. In the traditional publishing model, academic presses employ editors and external reviewers to filter their products prior to publication, to signal that books meet their selective standards and are deemed worth reading. Several digital publishing models reverse this equation by placing content on the Internet and relying on the wisdom of the readership to sort out what is — and is not — worth reading. Both exercise a form of peer review, but at different stages in the scholarly communication process. Media studies scholar Kathleen Fitzpatrick elaborates on this point:

In a self-multiplying scholarly commons, some kind of assessment of the material being published (or having been published) remains important, but not because of scarce resources; instead, what remains scarce are time and attention. For this reason, peer review needs to be put not in the service of gatekeeping, or determining what should be published for any scholar to see, but of filtering, or determining what of the vast amount of material that has been published is of interest or value to a particular scholar. As Clay Shirky has argued, “Filter-then-publish, whatever its advantages, rested on a scarcity of media that is a thing of the past. The expansion of social media means that the only working system is publish-then-filter” (Here Comes Everybody, 98). . . 29

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For many historians, our interest in the concept of “publish-then-filter” arose independently of the Internet. Arguably the most widely discussed issue of the Journal of American History in recent decades was a controversial roundtable issue in 1997, titled “What We See and Can’t See in the Past.” Editor David Thelen published an article on the history of lynching submitted by Joel Williamson, followed by six reviewer’s reports. After receiving all of the reports, Thelen persuaded everyone to attach their names to the original documents, “to demystify our own practice,” and openly published them in the journal alongside Williamson’s article. In his introduction, Thelen justified this nonconventional approach, arguing that, “we live in an age when historians are as interested in the doing of history as in the products of that doing.”30 The reviewers sharply disagreed on the strengths and weaknesses of Williamson’s historical analysis of race, and the numerous letters to the editor published in the subsequent issue of the journal revealed a deeper discussion about how historians judge the quality of each other’s scholarly writing.

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Elsewhere in the humanities, we have been inspired more recently by innovative combinations of web technology and open peer review that invigorate scholarly communication. Some of the most prominent examples are hybrids — a mixture of invited and public reviewers — that retain an editorial board’s sense of security in its appointed experts, while reaping the benefits of the crowd’s wisdom. In 2009, under the auspices of MediaCommonsPress, Kathleen Fitzpatrick released a full draft of her book manuscript, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, for open peer review in an agreement with her prospective publisher, NYU Press, which simultaneously sent it out for blind review.31 A year later, MediaCommonsPress hosted an open review edition of a leading literary journal, Shakespeare Quarterly, where contributors’ submissions received open review commentary from designated and self-selected reviewers.32 What is most striking about these hybrid models is their mixture of public space (for open commentary) and private space (for final editorial decisions).

Permalink for this paragraph0Our Proposal
We propose Writing History in the Digital Age as one (but certainly not the only) model for rethinking publishing in ways that preserve our scholarly values. As you immerse yourself in the individual essays on history, technology, and our craft as authors, consider the argument embedded in this book’s born-digital format, open-review editorial process, and open-access distribution. It’s time to flip the question. Rather than ask, “Why not publish scholarship on the open web?”, the answer we need to know is, “Why are we still holding onto proprietary print and e-book publishing if there are better ways to achieve our goals?” As academic authors, our primary aim is to maximize the quality and distribution of ideas. Whether we are motivated more by individual status or by broader principles, the rising price of hardcover-only books and commercial databases should cause alarm, and lead us to seriously consider alternatives. Is there any reason to limit peer review to a small number of readers, when hybrid open-review online models reap the dual benefits of invited experts and the public at large? Does it still make sense to lock our texts into proprietary digital formats, when open-web publishing can protect authors’ rights and connect us with wider communities of readers?

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We do not claim that the transition to open-web scholarly publishing will be easy. One defense of traditional publishing is that the unseen labor of editors and peer reviewers requires sustained financial support. Breaking away from book revenues, as the University of Michigan Press has done with its open-access digital monographs, is a bold yet not fully tested model. Are we expecting too much when asking readers to participate in the online open review? For instance, although we restricted each essay to no more than 5,000 words, our current total count for the volume is approximately 120,000 words, while our book contract limits the final manuscript to 90,000 words. As book co-editors, we expect to cut several essays after this round and recommend reductions for others. How will we manage this sensitive selection process between our public forum and private communications with individual authors? These and related issues of sustainable support, such as improving our open-source technology as browsers evolve, make this a very public experiment, where failure is always a possibility.

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Yet we remain confident in the growing movement in higher education in favor of open-access scholarship, and the natural alliance between faculty and libraries. As we write this, Princeton University’s faculty unanimously adopted a resolution to make their published works freely available online, following a trend by Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other institutions.33 At a time in which traditional models of scholarly communication appear increasingly limiting, we hope Writing History in the Digital Age will inspire others to join in breaking down these intellectual and professional barriers, all in the service of excellent scholarship.

Permalink for this paragraph0About the editors: Kristen Dombkowski Nawrotzki is Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Education (Pädagogische Hochschule) in Heidelberg, Germany and Senior Research Fellow in the Early Childhood Research Centre at Roehampton University in London, UK. She has published extensively on the history of early childhood education and related social policy in the United States and England.

Permalink for this paragraph0Jack Dougherty is an associate professor of educational studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, who is working with students and colleagues to create an open-access public history web-book titled, On The Line: How Schooling, Housing, and Civil Rights Shaped Hartford and its Suburbs.

Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History. A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (Center for History and New Media, 2005), accessed August 10, 2011, http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/. ↩

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One thing that strikes me reading through the essays in this book is the lack of discussion about digital history in and about parts of the world outside of North America and Europe. I only noticed one essay, “Pasts in a Digital Age” by Tanaka, that dealt in any substantive way with the rest of the world. And even those contributions on European or North American areas outside of the US are few and far between. One gets the sense that this book is really a conversation between Americanist historians about doing digital history in and about the US. Another overwhelming emphasis is the 19th-20th centuries. While there is nothing wrong with these emphases, I would like to see them acknowledged in the Introduction, along with a brief discussion of the reasons for and ramifications of such emphases. Especially given the concern of the editors with increasing the inclusivity and participatory nature of the historical enterprise, the challenge of interacting with and including the histories, historians, and reading publics of the global south seems worth mentioning, if not also tackling in some substantive way.

Thanks for your thoughtful criticism, Zayde, and you are indeed correct that most of our contributors specialize in modern North American and European history. But let’s take this a bit further. When I was a graduate student in Linda Gordon’s US history seminar at UW-Madison many years ago, we often criticized the book we were reading for failing to include the perspectives of women, workers, or people of color, and we thought that she (a prominent social historian) would readily agree. Instead, she pushed back and challenged us by asking: if the author had included this or that group, would it have changed the thesis of the book in any way?

I’m not sure if you are posing Linda Gordon’s question to ME, but if you are, here goes: If the overarching argument of the book is to persuade those of us in the historical profession to rethink or expand our thinking about the way we write, the way we publish, and the way we interact with each other and the “public,” and to use the book itself as an example of its argument, then I think that your argument would be more persuasive and the book more helpful to some of us if you considered the examples of doing history of earlier time periods and different parts of the world. I also think it would force you to consider more counter-evidence or some of the counter-evidence you already consider more deeply, such as uneven access to digital technologies across the globe (though of course this applies to expensive printed books as well), issues of language and translation, different institutional cultures (and political challenges) for professional historians and different configurations of reading “publics” in other parts of the world, the much more limited availability of digital resources for teaching students about other parts of the world and other time periods (the difficulty of finding shape files and other geospatial data at scales below the country level for the Middle East is a challenge I’ve faced), just to name a few that spring to mind. HOWEVER, my comment was not actually meant to force you to include this group or that group, or to say that the book is weaker for not including these groups; it was just to recommend that you acknowledge the emphasis in the essays collected here in the introduction to the volume… and perhaps that you present your own thoughts on whether it affects your argument or shapes your audience – in other words, how would YOU answer Linda Gordon’s question?
Let me say, though, in case it is not obvious, that I find this introduction and the book as a whole insightful, useful, and persuasive! I am, after all, a professional historian in a US-based institution of higher learning, and all of the points brought up in relation to economics and institutional culture are immediately compelling to me. So I hope you consider my comments as evidence of my enthusiasm for the project and the new questions it has prompted me to ask.

All of this is very helpful, Zayde. Criticism helps to clarify our thinking. Also, your response underscores that historians of the Western and non-Western worlds face similar challenges with respect to rising price of conventionally-published books. Although I don’t have evidence, my guess is that non-Western historians face even greater difficulties when searching for scholarly publishers who will distribute their work in a reasonably-priced book, given the domestic bias of the book-buying market. If true, does that mean historians of the non-Western world might have an even more compelling reason to consider open-access web publishing?

It seems to me clear, both in the introduction and the essays, that the book basically addresses itself to North American historians, mostly in universities. There’s no harm done in being somewhat more explicit about that focus.
That would have an important secondary benefit: It would permit a more prominent (i.e., earlier, and possibly more substantive) place for the institutional pressures shaping this discussion: In a world where the job market for historians is, if I understand things aright, even worse than that for literary folks (hard as that is to believe), then it’s a bit of a miracle that *anyone* does something even vaguely experimental.

I should also add that the essay on “Citizen Scholars” by Sikarskie considers the participation of people outside of North American and Europe in the online “Quilt Index” project. This brings to mind Minoo Moallem’s digital project on Persian carpets, which some of you might be interested in checking out:http://www.vectorsjournal.org/projects/index.php?project=83

For what it’s worth, I actually wrote down in my notes, barely a few paragraphs into the Graham/Massie/Feuerherm essay, ‘How refreshing to arrive in Canada!’ Probably only an Americanist finds great potential for comparatist study in Canada, but that essay did in fact, by its contrast with the U.S.-centered essays, expose some unspoken assumptions in the majority of the book. The authors’ effort to do ‘digital history’ across the digital divide stands out amid the numerous digital projects described throughout the volume. (Here i go romanticizing and essentializing Canada, but their impulse struck me as somehow of a piece with a national culture that is far more sensitive to its native population than the U.S. is, more attuned to economic disparities because it hasn’t mapped them on to race.) Whatever its origin, that project shows by contrast how many of the books’ other contributors see digital history as serving either (a) the academy (scholars or students), or (b) a ‘public’ that is roughly coterminous with the ‘general reader’ in whom (printed) historical writing sometimes finds an audience — which, of course, is a fairly small public (possibly larger if you throw in zealous editors of Wikipedia entries, but still. . .). What Zayde’s comments, and the outlier case of the Graham, et al. essay, suggest to me is that, with rare exceptions that may prove the rule, historians do not seem to be using digital technology as a way to involve people (as audience, source, or what have you) who weren’t already involved prior to the digital age.

It’s noteworthy how both the discussion and the platform seem to imagine comments as the ne plus ultra of web writing. A paragraph with a lot of comments is better, or more interesting, or more provocative, than one without. (Y’all even suggest that the presence of comments is suggestive of more, or more careful, reading.)
I understand why paragraph-level comments are helpful for a project such as this one, in its current state. After all, if this is a new sort of peer review/editing, then you need to be able to comment in a more fine-grained manner.
I worry about two different things. First, it’s Really. Not. Hard. to get comments on the web, and so I wonder what effects that lure would have on scholarly writing. You’ll know that things have gone too far when you see articles like, “Top 5 Reasons the Great Reform Bill Advanced 19thC Democracy (And 2 Reasons It Really Didn’t!)”
And second, a lot of my favorite web writing either disallows commenting altogether, or places heavy restrictions on commenters. From this point of view, a web site allows one the opportunity to develop one’s own take, and, if people want to respond in kind, they can very well get their own site. They’re cheap! While this may seem elitist (“Get off my lawn!!!”), it also recognizes that other people’s responses deserve a kind of equality of platform.

I don’t believe that a paragraph with more comments is likely to be more meaningful than one with fewer or no comments. I do think, however, that a paragraph with more comments is likely to be more useful to the author in the revising process (and even in her or his global thinking about research and writing) than one with fewer or no comments. Not all comments are helpful, ergo more comments are not necessarily better than fewer comments. But the presence of relevant comments is, I think, suggestive of something which we can (and ought to) use to improve our writing and the thinking behind it. If the comments are at all relevant, it tells us that the paragraph has been read (at all), something we don’t know about paper-based works (neither book sales data nor download statistics for digitized articles tell us whether anyone has actually read the darn things once they’ve got hold of them). The presence of relevant comments tells us that either the topic of the work (or the paragraph), or its title, or our own name as author led someone(s) to read it. If the comments are thoughtful, we can know that the contents of the paragraph were indeed thought-provoking, regardless of whether the thoughtful comments are critical, flattering, or somewhere in-between. (Here I would differentiate between provocative – your word – and thought-provoking, which I see as a different and more common goal.) We can also know (in our case, at least) who is making those comments, so that we can tell whether our work is being read by (anyone in) its intended audience, and/or whether it moves any of those readers to speak up. We still don’t know anything about those who don’t speak up, and we may choose to attend to or disregard those who speak up in ways which are outside of our scholarly cultural norms or who express points of view which we don’t like – or we may find it necessary to respond to critical comments in particular. Same goes for other commenters in the discussion – they may respond to or disregard each other. Naturally we can also search Twitter and the blogosphere and the newspapers and scholarly review outlets to find out who says they’re reading our work and what they might think about it, but that is normally well after publication rather than in the middle of the dynamic writing/revising/publishing process. Moreover, the paragraph-level commenting format here provides not only easy two-way communication but also a centralized forum for all of those interested in the topic or text to discuss (or to watch a discussion of) it in one place. I may be misunderstanding your point about equality of platform, but I don’t see how our asking for comments limits other people’s ability to develop their own WordPress site (and web-book!) to take further any of the topics addressed here. In fact, they could include a link to their own site in a comment here, if they want to, just as we might on theirs, if they allow comments. Because we’re not just allowing comments but asking commenters to participate in open peer review, I think we run less of a risk of the kind of degeneration of comments that you mentioned, but of course the risk is still there. The hope is that substantive, idea- and text-shaping discussion can take place on comment-enabled sites, and my feeling is that we have evidence of that very thing on this site already, present company included.

Much of what I have to say here is meant to be somewhat provocative, if gently so, in the hopes that it will help the project either by sparking some useful discussion or helping the editors consider alternatives.

This introduction sets out the objectives of the project and explains the purpose clearly. It begins with the key issue of open review, as it should. It claims that “embedded within” the book is a “broader argument for rethinking how academics publish our work.” While it seems that this project does in fact create “a better way” to publish an edited volume, the larger argument about scholarly production remains murky to me. “Liquid scholarship” is a terrific metaphor, though I wished for more explication and in the essays more follow through on this conceptual framework.

This piece and perhaps the collection as a whole, with the exception of Dorn, give little attention to long-form digital argument or narrative and whether this will find a place in the profession. E books and the Kindle and other reading devices may alter our practices. At this point, how much of the difficulty historians have faced in constructing long form digital narrative is technological–the browser, the screen, the lack of electronic ink? Long form argument is currently in trouble in the digital age, according to some. I wanted to know more about where this form of writing might take place online.

The editors are right to be concerned about young faculty and what “counts.” Their call for a “middle ground” is welcome. The concerns over our current publishing model are well-founded. One of the principal functions of presses is editorial oversight. And much of the history writing on the web in wikis, blogs, and web sites lacks this important quality. This project, and others like it, can provide open access scholarship but should aim for the standards often upheld in university press publication.

My main concern at this point, despite the open access publication (important) and the open review process (also important), is that the volume presented here is a book in digital form. The editors here suggest that it should “look like a book.” Why? Is this potentially a serious limitation on the project? Should this volume take more advantage of its underlying digital nature? Is “integrating narrative text and multimedia source materials” enough? I have tried a number of experiments in narrative form as digital publications, and in each case have been at pains to move beyond this sort of “integration.” Some of the essays uphold fine examples of digital history projects and scholarship (see especially Theibault), but we have few examples of digital scholarly forms that stretch our models. Richard White’s spatial history work is cited in Theibault, but for the visualizations assembled largely after that narrative text’s research was well underway. The hybrid model he has undertaken, however, is also focused on the scholarly process of publication–the Stanford team’s open footnote archive (which has little to do with the visualizations) strikes me as one of the most interesting and useful examples of the kind of digital publication models Nawrotzki and Dougherty are suggesting. In any case I would like to encourage some questions about “integrating” text and and multimedia–and whether this constitutes a change in scholarly practice or publication.

I like very much the challenge that Kristen Nawrotzki and Jack Dougherty have posed–do we want readers? And their argument, based on Fitzpatrick and Shirky, that filter-then-publish is rapidly being eroded on the Internet and that publish-then-filter will likely grow in importance in our practice.

I also appreciate that the editors understand that the transition to more open scholarly publishing will require alternative fiscal support and financial structures. Digital publishing is clearly not a cheaper alternative, and once scaled it may be far more expensive than traditional print scholarship.

“More deeply” than what? (Than Hacking the Academy?)
Also, if I understand the process correctly, writers composed their papers in Word, and then y’all retconned them into CommentPress? If so, then I think the analogy to the industry practice of eating one’s own dog food calls for more explication.

Yes, we received the essays in Word and then we uploaded them into WordPress. But some of the essays (this one, at least) were composed in GoogleDocs, not in Word (a necessity, since Jack and I were working several thousand miles and a 6-hour time difference apart). Once the essays were on our site (but not yet public), authors had a 2-week period to revise them – in WordPress. Some authors made only minor revisions or none at all, but others made major revisions right within WordPress. From log-in data we know that co-authors of some of the essays used our WordPress site to make both concurrent and asynchronous edits to their texts, not unlike the way Jack and I used GoogleDocs for our initial essay draft.

Our papers were written, and marked up, as pages within this site using WordPress technology. Knowing this would be done, I originally drafted mine offline in TextPad but other contributors may have done it in Word, who knows. I don’t think it alters the fact that they were submitted `web-ready’, not print-ready.

Although, I note, pseudonymous feedback certainly is. Is the reason to prevent anonymous commentary, then, just a way of creating a minimal cost of entry, such that articles don’t turn into YouTube pages?

I am just musing here about the pros and cons of doing this for a monograph. I know it has been done, and certainly one can invite comments from others this way. But many of the advantages you cite, such as cross-fertilization of ideas, seems to suit collaborative and edited volumes best. Nor is it necessarily clear to me why an online reader would willingly wade through an entire monograph-length manuscript to add his or her comments, since there is no evidence the manuscript is worthwhile (all sorts of things appear on the web, after all). So this might also work best for scholars who are already known, despite your hope that this medium will help bring all of us into scholarly discussion on an equal basis.

I like many things about this idea of public comment and review. However, given my frail ego, I’m not sure of how well it will work in two different situations. First, there have been times I have been asked to evaluate a manuscript for an article or book and I thought it was not only bad but hopelessly bad. I need to tell the publisher not to spend more time on this. But I would never have the heart to say this in a public forum. Too humiliating for the author. Might the most challenging comments therefore be left out in this public process?
My second fear is on the other end of the screen, so to speak, as an author. While I appreciate helpful criticism, or different points of view, these are not always phrased in the most judicious of ways. (And the need to reread and revise one’s comments seems less compelling on on-line forums, so such initial expressons of distaste are less likely to be rephrased by the critic than something that needs to be written and then sent to an editor.) Ideally critics would be sensitive to the fact that their comments are public but what if they are not? Wouldn’t I feel both hurt and humiliated to be told my work (or I) was stupid, false, ignorant, whatever? Even inadvertent comments may hurt, since we do not know the “baggage” writers bring and therefore don’t know what buttons we may inadvertently be pushing. Couple that with the notorious inability of technological methods to communicate nuance, comments may be taken out of context and you end up in a kind of flame war, all in public.
All of this makes me nervous. What’s nice about named posts is that you can identify the person offering the comments and if it is, say, a member of an organization with an axe to grind about your work, we can all dismiss it as such. But what if you don’t know the name?
I’m not oppsed to public comment. I think whole discussion threads like these can be fascinating. But in the case of negative comments, I do worry about the limits of public postings.

I hope I’m not overstepping my bounds but I think I can speak for most if not all of the authors of essays in this volume when I say that we are nervous about many of the same things you have mentioned, for the reasons you described.Our work and others’ opinions of it are utterly and completely exposed here.This open review process is indeed a risky undertaking and – at this stage of experimentation, in the absence of an established culture of open peer review — we don’t know what kind of responses we’ll get and we don’t know who we’ll get them from.Which would be worse:having lots of critical comments (demonstrating that [a] we have readers and [b] that they feel our project or ideas are worth commenting on); or receiving no comments at all?We’re committed to this experiment because we want to find out and because, to put it quite simply, somebody needs to stick their neck out and see if their head gets chopped off.Will reviewers note weaknesses by flagging them outright, by offering veiled criticism,or by abstaining from commenting at all (as in, if you’ve nothing nice to say, then don’t say anything at all)? Of course, this open review process entails risk for the reviewers themselves as well, which is why we authors are particularly grateful for the many thoughtful comments we’ve received from people like yourself thus far. One of the best things that has happened to me so far is that I’ve received comments from people whose names I don’t know (but who by definition have an interest in what I’ve written).If I want to, I (or anyone else who reads their comment) can google them or email them and find out who they are, deciding by virtue of their comment or of their qualifications and affiliations (or both) whether to heed and/or respond to their comment or not. I think we are just at the beginnings of what might eventually become a productive open review culture with its own widely-accepted norms, and it’ll be some time before we can say what one should expect in this process both as author and open peer reviewer.Until then (or at least until the end of our open peer review period, on November 14th), I, for one, will be at the edge of my seat.

I quite agree with Cheryl Greenberg. This reluctance about online publishing and posting is mentioned in several places in this volume (particularly with regard to student fears). I think such concerns about online publishing may serve to improve the standard of work submitted encouraging authors to think twice before submitting essays knowing that the review of their work is public. This is only an idea – I wonder whether this fits with what our authors have said about their experiences.

I echo Kristen’s comments here. I was very excited by the danger inherent in making this process public. I’ve been blogging for some time now, and I’ve found that putting my material out there in the wilds of the internet has on balance done more good than harm.<p>
Even things that haven’t worked in their intended sphere – teaching experiments, for instance – have generated positive outcomes once I got over my fear of showing my ‘failure’ to the world. The conversation that results is often very much ‘unconference’ like (THATCamps), and moves my work forward. Don’t be afraid to fail gloriously!<p>
For my student co-authors in particular (if I can speak for them here), the process is especially nerve-racking, as they are not at all used to the idea of exposing their work to an audience greater than one (me). I want them to see that the risk is worth the reward: that digital history takes place in a community, and this open peer review process represents a way of writing & crafting history in one step.

I wonder whether it was rather more difficult for authors to engage with each other at the ideas stage. It is sometimes hard to get a good insight into a piece from one paragraph. At this stage following the review of essays as a whole I wonder what prospects there are for authors who have written on similar topics to come together as co-authors. I also wonder in what ways it might be possible for the dialogue and comments of authors and reviewers to be captured.

Part of me would like to see the Introduction begin here — just taking up the central intellectual problem of the volume, without yet broaching the book’s interventions re: medium and process. Why? Because the current opening paragraphs strike me as having a slightly defensive subtext — as if to say, ‘Reader, we know you’re suspicious, that you’re not sure what this is that you’re reading, and that you may not believe it’s really a “book” — so let us explain to you that it really is pretty much a book, except that in important ways it’s also not exactly a book in the way that you’re used to.’
I think it would be be a bolder gesture to begin the book in exactly the way you would if it were a traditional, printed and bound edited volume: here’s what this book is about. The subtext of that kind of opening would be: this is a book, equal in stature to any other book. And then you could go on to explain: but wait! There’s more! This book is actually doing several things that other books can’t or don’t do!

Many thanks for drawing our attention to this. We did initially contemplate addressing the medium and process aspects in a preface as opposed to here in the introduction, but then felt the remove would be too great. However, the suggestion to re-order the components of the introduction in the service of our more meaningful message seems to me a good one. I feel the subtext here is definitely something Jack and I should revisit and perhaps re-gauge, and it’s helpful to know from others how it’s coming across.

I find your last statement somewhat questionable in once sense – If that is a true statement, why do I find so many monographs that are written that they can not be read without a dictionary or that the sentence structure leads to misreading what has been written. Sometimes, I have to actually outline the chapter just to understand it.
I must admit that I love a well written narrative full of “meaningful insights about the past” that actually becomes a good story – now if I could just find more of them.
Hopefully, this new digital age will help that come about.

Jacqueline and Jonathan – it sounds like we all agree that “we appreciate the importance of narrative and the ability to wrap meaningful insights about the past into a good story.” I thought it had been covered by “Historians value good writing” – a statement you seem to agree with. What we didn’t say is “Historians are good writers.” — for the reasons you both have noted. Having said that, we are hopeful that open peer review and some of the many digital tools and publishing formats (not least the web-book) will help in this regard. In the meantime, we’ll have another look at the phrasing here regarding real and ideal and see if we can make the point more clearly. I’m glad you flagged this as requiring clarification, as I assumed it was already clear and thus would’ve missed it.

I wish there were stats documenting these numbers in the late 1980s (for word processing) and early 1990s (for e-mail). *Did* people shift to word processors more quickly than they’ve (not-)flocked to the web? In my own department–which is not history–I note the existence of by-laws indicating that typing of articles and such will be performed by the administrative assistant existing far later than one might imagine.

This is such a key point. It is for this reason that I hope this volume is read by undergraduate and post-graduate course managers. It is so important we prepare students with the skills for writing history in the digital age. Reading some of the examples of this, in this volume, suggests that the book ought to be read by course managers and supervisors. There are so many new techniques and platforms for analysing and representing historical sources and accounts, which I was unaware of until I read this volume. I really hope that more students find there way to learn of these opportunities, whether independently or through taught courses.

I agree that we lack the time to learn a new vocabulary or even appreciate the tools that are available to us. But I also think that your comment about “curation” as opposed to “detective work” speaks to another reason historians may resist this. I use the web and digital media as tools, to gather materials but my goal is not just to collect the information but to analyze it. It is precisely the “detective work” in the sense of making sense of things, that I would want to emphasize, while the web seems more curatorial. I’m not saying it must be, but I wanted to raise the question. I think we need to think about how on-line work actually changes the history we do (for example, links challenging linearity) before we may embrace it enthusiastically.
By the way, a typo in the last sentence.

I think the question of what “counts” is determined less by medium (print, on-line) and more by the evaluation or vetting process. So on a tenure committee I would worry that on-line published material has not had the careful peer review we expect from scholarly sources. That’s not to say on-line work can’t be peer reviewed (although see my comments on public review, above). Nor is it to relinquish my own responsibility to evaluate the quality of a candidate. Nevertheless, we are usually evaluating people not in our immediate field and to have had material reviewed by scholars who are in the same field as the candidate is incredibly helpful. Again, I’m not saying this can’t be resolved (you yourselves resolve it with the U of Mich Press), but that it must be resolved before committees will comfortably “count” on-line materials.

This paragraph does an excellent job of explaining what you are trying to accomplish with this open source e-book, and I think that this entire effort is a noble one. The idea of utilizing the tools that have graced us to share and disseminate knowledge will help us to continue to evolve as scholars and researchers.

This argument may, inadvertently, lead us to conclude that since books are done for, we should go digital. Greater use of digital books would have an impact on publishers, I would think, which would only speed the process of raising prices of books or making them less common. And as a reader of books (like those in your next paragraph) I am loathe to do anything to threaten academic publishers. I guess we need to ask ourselves, is there any reason to preserve books themselves? And if so, is there a way to address the problem — spiraling costs — rather than just yielding to the inevitability of the problem?

“Looks like a book” — I agree. I love wordpress but so far this doesn’t actually look like a book. The paragraphs are odd, as if they are numbered bullet points, you have to scroll to read, and it’s hard to tell where you are in the chapter or section (the bar on the right tells me I’m about 3/4 of the way through, but through what? The chapter? The book? The section? The space I have to comment?) I know you guys are aware of this; I’m just saying I look forward to the day when it actually does look like a book to a greater extent.

What were the findings of the Planned Obsolescence experience? Did public reviewers and private reviewers come to similar conclusions? If so, it suggests blind reviewers work fine. (And so would public). If not, were the comments more appropriate and relevant from the blind or the public reviewers? That is, did blind reviewing work in the sense that they could be more honest and therefore more useful, or did it fail in the sense that a couple of blind reviewers were narrower than public reviews, and therefore less helpful?

This is a noble aim and I wish this book every success. Recently, at a seminar regarding publishing options I suggested that writers needed to choose to publish in open-access volumes. Responses suggested that I was perceived as ideological and naive, reading your aims and this volume I now feel I was right in my suggestion. This book is an example of how open-access volumes can have the credibility and strengths associated with traditional subscription-based publications. Thank you!